How to Market Your Photography Business During the COVID-19 Lockdown

Are you struggling to market your photography business in the COVID-19 pandemic?

All businesses will be affected by it in the coming months and it’s important you are ready to change your marketing methods to handle the inevitable downturn in bookings.

How to prepare your photography business for the economic downturn

You may have already been impacted by companies pulling budgets and whole marketing departments losing your jobs.

A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.

Henry Ford

That’s why it’s important to have a plan.

Take this downtime as a blessing, as photographers, we’re always complaining we don’t have enough time to market ourselves.

This is the time to market.

First off, make sure your website is in the best possible shape it can be.

If you need help with this, there are loads of free resources available at the moment, check out my covid 19 resources post if you need some help.

Then take some time to go through all your social media and make sure it is all cohesive and you’re showing your best work.

If you have a scheduling tool, like Buffer, use it to schedule out your content for the next few months, so when things pick up again you’re already ahead of the curve.

Now your stall is in order, it’s time to find some customers.

How to reach out to potential clients in a recession

Before I go into this, it’s important to realise that many people are losing their jobs and have their own worries, only reach out to people you know you can genuinely help.

If you annoy someone now with the wrong approach you won’t get another chance.

Now is not the time to be sending out mass emails claiming to be the best photographer in all the land.

Start by identifying your best customers and which market sectors they are in.

Find other companies also in these sectors who are similar, using the “People also search for” tab in Google is a good way of getting a few ideas.

Take to social media, Linkedin is great for this, find the person you need to talk to in that organisation.

Find their pain point, this won’t be the fact they need to sell more shi*t, go beneath the surface, research the company and really find out how you can help them.

Connect with that person but do not sell to them. Ask them how they are doing and if it’s ok to have a chat. They will have a lot going on right now so realise 15 minutes of their time with you is 15 minutes of them not fire fighting elsewhere. Let them know that you appreciate their time.

If they agree, ask to send them an email and send it straight away.

Use the email to show them how you can solve their problems, don’t talk about yourself, they don’t care right now.

If you get a positive reaction, get them on the phone. People are crying out for human interaction right now, talk about their pain points and how you can help them going forward. If you mention you’re an award winning photographer, you deserved to have the phone hung up on you.

Make sure you stay in contact with them. Nobody knows how long this is going to go on for, drop them an email again in a couple of weeks and just ask how they are doing.

When it all gets back to normal, and it will get back to normal, you should have made genuine connections with the right people who you know you can help.

Walid Azami has put a short video together on this process if you want anymore information, check it out: